The present invention relates to electronic books and, in particular, to processing of annotations and/or diagrams originally contained in scanned electronic books (E-books).
E-books are increasingly becoming popular due largely to its convenience. Electronic book resources include ancient books, classics, scientific research reports, government publications magazines, documents and so on. They are readily available in websites, smart phones as well as special-purpose E-books apparatus.
There are many types of E-books. Some E-books are scanned from paper books or documents without any change to their original layout. These kinds of E-books are referred to as scanned E-books. A scanned E-book contains scanned text pages and may additionally contain scanned annotation pages. The scanned annotation pages contain annotations associated with the text in the text pages. The annotations may also be associated with diagrams contained in the scanned annotation pages.
Scanned text pages and scanned annotation pages are substantially images. Since images are not editable by computer, it is not convenient for E-books providers to adapt text pages such that an annotation will appear in the same page as the text with which the annotation is associated. When a user is reading such a scanned E-book with an E-book reading device, he or she needs to page up and down in order to switch between text pages and annotation pages to look for annotations for the content in the text. It is especially the case when reading academic papers and professional books that usually have a number of annotations and/or complex diagrams associated with the annotations. Obviously, switching between text pages and annotation pages is not user-friendly and would spoil the reading experience.